The News: Adobe announced the expansion of Adobe Firefly to enterprises and the native integration of Adobe Sensei GenAI into Adobe Experience Cloud. Adobe Firefly, the company’s new GenAI-powered image generator, will now be available to all employees across an enterprise through the standalone Firefly application, Adobe Express, and Creative Cloud. In addition, Adobe is natively integrating GenAI-powered text generation features powered by Adobe Sensei GenAI across Customer Journey Analytics, Experience Manager, Journey Optimizer, and Marketo Engage. You can read the Press Releases here and here.
Firefly, Sensei GenAI Ascendent: Adobe Excels at Generative AI
Analyst Take: It is hard not to notice how rapidly Adobe is rolling out Generative AI. Perhaps more impressive than the speed is the pragmatic and responsible way Adobe is leveraging generative AI. Out of the box, Adobe Firefly addressed the shortcomings of other image generation options by protecting artists’ copyright concerns – images are generated only from Adobe Stock and publicly available content. In the press release, Adobe says since the Adobe Firefly launch in March, users have generated more than 200 million images. Now Adobe is expanding Adobe Firefly across multiple platforms. It is not easy to do such a thing without careful planning and flexible foundational structures.
While Adobe Firefly addresses image generation, the company is rolling out text generation through Adobe Sensei GenAI in a series of native integrations of large language model (LLM) capabilities into Adobe Experience Cloud applications. Again, Adobe addresses some of the main challenges for LLMs – bias and accuracy. How? Adobe Sensei GenAI leverages AI models from Google’s FLAN-T5 LLM, but the data comes largely not from public data, where the dangers of bias and accuracy loom, but from data anchored in Adobe Experience Platform. This private data set, according to the press release, “allows brands to train generative AI models on proprietary customer insights, customizing the output for brand-specific use cases.”
Why Adobe is Good at AI
There are several reasons, but in summary: Adobe corporate culture is ideal for innovation, and the company has had a vision for and long-term commitment to AI, along with compelling use cases and AI experience.
Corporate culture: Adobe’s culture is about, “How do we get better at what we do? What are the best options to do so?” It is such a strong directive that it breaks departmental and business unit silos and paves the way for innovation.
Vision, long-term commitment to AI: Adobe leadership committed to investing in AI about 10 years ago. It started at the top.
Compelling use cases: Adobe’s business lends itself theoretically to the benefits of AI – automating production of creative content and processes.
AI experience: Adobe has had the opportunity to learn its way through an entire AI lifecycle – continuously exploring the questions of what AI can do, how we can apply AI to what we do, and what the risks are to Adobe and customers of how AI is used. With this kind of experience, the emergence of generative AI was a natural evolution the company could take advantage of that few others have been able to do.
Why competitors should keep a close eye on Adobe:
It is difficult for companies to duplicate Adobe’s AI experience. Many Adobe competitors are likely not as far along in their AI experience. Some might be thinking about AI for the first time because of the generative AI phenomena. To leverage AI, companies must step through the AI lifecycle process – what AI to use, how does this AI help us, should we use this AI, what are the risks to using this AI, etc.
In a briefing with analysts, an Adobe director was asked what the market impact of these GenAI innovations might be. He said he thought the market is entering a period of unprecedented creativity to try these things. Creatives are doing a lot of production work, so if you can remove that from their workloads, you unlock new opportunity. He mentioned that Adobe customers say they are creating a lot more content and these tools are allowing them to do more with less.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Generative AI, Core Creative Functionality Integrated into Adobe Express
Adobe Announces Generative AI innovations Across Adobe Experience Cloud at Adobe Summit
Author Information
Based in Tampa, Florida, Mark is a veteran market research analyst with 25 years of experience interpreting technology business and holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Florida.
